Category Archives: Asides

Designed by Automattic’s Ola Laczek, Sela puts a vibrant spin on the business theme and is now available for download at WordPress.org. With plenty of space to accommodate large images, Sela puts the focus on your company with a bold front-page template and a grid-page template perfect for showcasing products or services. With Jetpack, you’ll also get integrated testimonials and the option to upload a logo graphic. Sela is a beautiful canvas on which to tell your business’s story and looks great on all devices, from desktop to mobile. Download it now or check out the demo site.

Two new free themes from Automattic are now available at WordPress.org.

Long a popular business theme over at WordPress.com, Motif now makes its debut in the WordPress.org directory. A fork of Okay Themes’ Paradigm theme, Motif was completely overhauled by Frank Klein on both the design and code fronts, resulting in a responsive theme well suited to companies and organizations looking for a professional and contemporary web presence.

Capoverso was born as a minimalist typographic theme that could be massively customized with just a couple of images, allowing the expression of the author’s personality in a rich yet simple way. This shows at its best on the homepage: a full-screen image that has large text and the main navigation beneath. Just a couple of tweaks and it’s really your theme.

Discover Intergalactic, a new free theme designed by Mel Choyce and developed by Caroline Moore. With prominent featured images, high-contrast typography, and a slide-out side panel for menu and widgets, Intergalactic makes a bold statement while keeping the focus on your images and text. Download it from the WordPress.org directory or explore the demo.

Minnow, a new free theme designed by Automattic’s Mel Choyce and developed by Caroline Moore, is now available for download in the WordPress.org directory. Looking for a fresh, clean theme perfect for a contemporary blog? Give Minnow a spin.

Everyone knows that we love WordPress Themes which means, of course, that we also love WordPress. But we don’t go around saying it everyday even though we do. With the 10th anniversary of WordPress around the corner of a team meetup in Italy the WordPress.com Theme Team had a chance to not just to say it but show it, in a way. Here we all are showing our WordPress pride in our 10th Anniversary WordPress shirts.

Keep doing what you do WordPress and we’ll keep trying to make beautiful themes that do you justice. We’re looking forward to many more years of making it easy for anyone to publish on the web — and making it look amazing.

Did you know we have a Premium Theme Team at WordPress.com? They’re the folks who audit all of the premium themes available on WordPress.com — that’s not just the themes we make but also the ones made by other shops too — and make sure we have a consistently amazing experience with them. Philip Arthur Moore leads that team and there’s a great interview with him on the WordPress.com news blog.

The majority of my waking hours are spent feverishly obsessing over making premium themes a world-class experience for all WordPress users. This means a lot of different things: ensuring that customers are well-supported in our premium themes forum; auditing every single line of code in every premium theme; educating the WordPress theming community on proper approaches to WordPress theme development; and with my colleagues coming up with strong, robust guidelines for developing themes the WordPress.com way.

Philip also spends a ton of time working on _s. I love everything about this quote.

It’s hard to understand the power of _s unless you see what’s built with it. Further, Ryu, A Simpler Time, and Untitled were all created using _s, but you’d never know it without being told and that’s what makes the starter theme so powerful. To date, Underscores has around 34 total contributors and it’s always open to more. I’ll continue to work on it because it provides a solid benchmark on which to grade other themes and it also gives me a chance to interact with the theming community.